In a society so fully bent toward production at all costs, we should remember, as art critic David Sylvester once said, “Artists must be allowed to get into a mess.” As we consider how we might listen, slow down, and make a mess in support of our own work, we’ll take our inspiration from writers like Jon Fosse and Gayle Jones, who write as if it were an act of listening, and the painter Mark Bradford who said, “I pillage my own work. I tear it down and build it up in traces.” Guided analytical and inquiry-based discussions and writing activities will encourage writers to build a sustainable writing practice that embraces both their own artistic impulses and the material worlds in which they live.
Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop-out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.
